Gallon Environment Letter – the daily edition – a policy letter from the Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment

Research seeks to characterize the climate change deniers

It is important for government and business to understand those who influence public opinion. Hence GallonDaily’s interest was immediately drawn to a recent paper by two University of Colorado researchers in the journal Celebrity Studies. The 16 page paper is entitled ‘Wise contrarians’: a keystone species in contemporary climate science, politics and policy.

The paper focuses on what it describes as a heterogeneous yet loosely configured set of people dubbed ‘climate contrarians’, who have achieved veritable celebrity status in contemporary discussions of climate science, politics and policy in the twenty-first-century public sphere, often through the guise of public intellectualism. It analyses:

the motivations that prop up these contrarian stances, such as ideological or evidentiary disagreement to the orthodox views of science;

the drive to fulfil the perceived desires of special interests (for example, carbon-based industry);

the exhilaration from self-perceived academic martyrdom; and

the more general desire for notoriety.

The researchers conclude that the views of these ‘wise contrarians’ are a reflection of contemporary cultural politics and they will not disappear any time soon.